Keith Scribner

The author of The Oregon Experiment, a 2011 novel that was, in its way prescient to much of what is going on right now, Keith Scribner makes this welcome return from Corvallis, where he teaches at Oregon State University, to read for his newest novel, Old Newgate Road (Knopf).

“A man returns to his long-abandoned childhood home, stirring up memories from a traumatic boyhood in this gripping saga from Scribner (The Oregon Experiment). Set among the sweet-smelling tobacco fields of East Granby, Conn., Cole Callahan remembers his childhood home—where his parents and the Callahan children conducted unceasing restoration efforts, and where Cole’s father abused his mother, eventually killing her—as a locus of violence and thrumming fear … Scribner’s narrative draws out themes of masculinity, sublimated trauma, and physical violence—speaking to the ways people fashion narratives out of troubled pasts to survive, resulting in a probing, tightly-plotted novel.” - Publishers Weekly.